Knowing the origins of your career is one of the essentials of any job. A few years ago I began asking a simple question of DBA interviewees: Who invented SQL? The answers I received were disappointing but not surprising. Microsoft was the most popular answer. No, it wasn’t Microsoft as SQL was conceived while Bill Gates was still being stuffed into lockers by high school jocks. Dr. E. F. Codd was offered forth with great confidence by several. Again, wrong, though getting warmer, while “Ted” Codd did write the groundbreaking paper “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”, he had very little to do with SQL. At least, they identified the right company, IBM.

Out of hundreds of applicants only one knew the correct answer. That person was a DB2 DBA and knew that SQL came from the mind of two Electrical Engineers at IBM, Ray Boyce and Don Chamberlin.

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